1. Technical Field
The invention relates to the field of telephony and, more particularly, to the field of voice browsers.
2. Description of the Related Art
Voice browser technology is used to develop interactive telephony services. For example, interactive voice response units, referred to as IVRs, can be implemented with a voice browser and one or more voice markup language modules referred to as voicelets. When a telephone call is received, the telephone call can be routed to a voice browser. The voice browser can answer the telephone call, and after answering the telephone call, can load a voicelet to process the telephone call.
Conventional voice browsers, however, must answer a received telephone call prior to launching a voicelet within the voice browser. As such, conventional voice browser technology precludes the implementation of any service applications which can run independently of a received call or that must be loaded prior to receiving or answering an incoming call. Thus, for example, service applications such as “800” number translation, calling name delivery, and local number portability, which require a voicelet to be launched prior to answering a call cannot be implemented using conventional voice browser technology.